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Hey all y'all,
Here's another nice bicycle shed discussion. During the recent
discussion about globals being harmful, Walter told me something that
made me think. I said, hey, there are things that are global - look at
stdout. He said, well, that's a bad thing. He then argued that it would
be better and cleaner to write:
stdout.writeln("Hello, world");
instead of the current:
writeln("Hello, world");
On one hand, I agree with Walter. On the other, I want to avoid the
phenomenon of the all-too-long "Hello, world" example.
What do you think?
Andrei

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 08:35:35AM -0700, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> What do you think?
Eeek. That's too much typing for a trivial, common operation.
I wouldn't mind writefln being implemented as a macro that is turned to
fwritefln(stdout, ...)
But, I'd be fairly annoyed having to write the extra seven characters each
time if the short version wasn't there.
> Andrei
--
Adam D. Ruppe
http://arsdnet.net

Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> Hey all y'all,
>
>
> Here's another nice bicycle shed discussion. During the recent
> discussion about globals being harmful, Walter told me something that
> made me think. I said, hey, there are things that are global - look at
> stdout. He said, well, that's a bad thing. He then argued that it would
> be better and cleaner to write:
>
> stdout.writeln("Hello, world");
>
> instead of the current:
>
> writeln("Hello, world");
>
> On one hand, I agree with Walter. On the other, I want to avoid the
> phenomenon of the all-too-long "Hello, world" example.
>
> What do you think?
There must be something I'm missing here. Either writeln is using a
global "stdout" which you can't see in it's interface, or you are using
that global "stdout" yourself and invoking writeln on it. There's still
a global around. Nothing solved.

Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> Hey all y'all,
>
>
> Here's another nice bicycle shed discussion. During the recent
> discussion about globals being harmful, Walter told me something that
> made me think. I said, hey, there are things that are global - look at
> stdout. He said, well, that's a bad thing. He then argued that it would
> be better and cleaner to write:
>
> stdout.writeln("Hello, world");
But then stdout is still global :-) However, I do think an "fwritef"
routine would be good to have--I tend to write to stderr as often as stdout.

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 11:35 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu
<SeeWebsiteForEmail@erdani.org> wrote:
> Hey all y'all,
>
>
> Here's another nice bicycle shed discussion. During the recent discussion
> about globals being harmful, Walter told me something that made me think. I
> said, hey, there are things that are global - look at stdout. He said, well,
> that's a bad thing. He then argued that it would be better and cleaner to
> write:
>
> stdout.writeln("Hello, world");
>
> instead of the current:
>
> writeln("Hello, world");
>
> On one hand, I agree with Walter. On the other, I want to avoid the
> phenomenon of the all-too-long "Hello, world" example.
>
> What do you think?
Keep writefln. You're only going to be using it when (1) you're doing
debugging, when you want it short, and (2) you're writing a simple
console program. There's always dout.writefln when you need more
power.

"Adam D. Ruppe" <destructionator@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:mailman.967.1237304767.22690.digitalmars-d@puremagic.com...
> On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 08:35:35AM -0700, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> What do you think?
>
> Eeek. That's too much typing for a trivial, common operation.
>
> I wouldn't mind writefln being implemented as a macro that is turned to
> fwritefln(stdout, ...)
>
> But, I'd be fairly annoyed having to write the extra seven characters each
> time if the short version wasn't there.
>
That's how tango and C# do it.
Stdout.formatln("Hello"); // Tango
Console.WriteLine("Hello"); // C#
My preference has always been for something shorter, but the current
tango/C# ways have never really bothered me. You get used to it pretty
quick.

On Tue, 17 Mar 2009 08:56:58 -0700, Sean Kelly
<sean@invisibleduck.org> wrote:
>Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> Hey all y'all,
>>
>>
>> Here's another nice bicycle shed discussion. During the recent
>> discussion about globals being harmful, Walter told me something that
>> made me think. I said, hey, there are things that are global - look at
>> stdout. He said, well, that's a bad thing. He then argued that it would
>> be better and cleaner to write:
>>
>> stdout.writeln("Hello, world");
>
>But then stdout is still global :-) However, I do think an "fwritef"
>routine would be good to have--I tend to write to stderr as often as stdout.
writef recognizes if its first parameter is a stream. you can already
use writef(stderr, ...)

== Quote from Andrei Alexandrescu (SeeWebsiteForEmail@erdani.org)'s article
> Hey all y'all,
> Here's another nice bicycle shed discussion. During the recent
> discussion about globals being harmful, Walter told me something that
> made me think. I said, hey, there are things that are global - look at
> stdout. He said, well, that's a bad thing. He then argued that it would
> be better and cleaner to write:
> stdout.writeln("Hello, world");
> instead of the current:
> writeln("Hello, world");
> On one hand, I agree with Walter. On the other, I want to avoid the
> phenomenon of the all-too-long "Hello, world" example.
> What do you think?
> Andrei
To me, the current form is best because it doesn't force you to explicitly specify
that you want to write to stdout. Thus, it makes simple things simple. Of course
DWIM isn't always a good idea, but when an obvious, safe default exists, I prefer
not to have to explicitly specify this kind of stuff unless I want to override the
default.
Also, I don't see globals as being all that evil in themselves. Global _mutable_
state is an absolute mortal sin, but I see absolutely nothing wrong with global
variables that are immutable, or even set once and treated as read-only by
convention after initialization.

Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> Here's another nice bicycle shed discussion. During the recent
> discussion about globals being harmful, Walter told me something that
> made me think. I said, hey, there are things that are global - look at
> stdout. He said, well, that's a bad thing. He then argued that it would
> be better and cleaner to write:
>
> stdout.writeln("Hello, world");
>
> instead of the current:
>
> writeln("Hello, world");
I thought the current was printf :-)
Looking at dmd/samples/d/hello.d
--anders